Top 5 Twitter Tools for Social Media Community Managers

Do you manage a social media community? Are you looking for an easier way to manage what happens on Twitter?

Here are five tools to help make your Twitter workflow more efficient, along with some simple instructions on how to use them.

#1: Schedule your tweets more efficiently

Not everyone agrees that scheduling tweets is the best approach. Twitter is, after all, a platform based on real-time interaction.However, offering tweets of relevant industry news content for your community is a way to brand yourself as a resource or thought leader and give people an incentive to follow you. Scheduling tweets of this curated content frees you up to answer questions from your community and monitor search terms.

With Buffer, you can select times throughout the day to send your tweets and load up your “buffer” with your key messages. There are three pricing plans – free, $5/month and $30/month, with the premium plans offering more accounts, users, tweets and times.

Scheduling tweets with Buffer is easy. First, you set your times in your dashboard.

Set times in your dashboard.

You head on over to your Buffer section and schedule the tweets. A Chrome extension makes it easy to schedule tweets right from articles themselves.

Schedule tweets of your favorite content with a Chrome extension.

Finally, Buffer offers some basic analytics that are quite helpful. It shows you number of clicks, reach and retweets (plus who retweeted) for each tweet that you schedule. At the very least, it shows you which tweets and headlines resonate the most with your audience. This is especially helpful when it comes to driving traffic to your own content.

Buffer offers some basic analytics about the performance of your tweets.

Although just about every other mainstream Twitter client like TweetDeck or HootSuite offers the tweet scheduling function these days, I like to use Buffer for this task. Not having to select a time for individual tweets that I am scheduling is a great component of the interface. Give it a try.

#2: Create easy and interesting content for your community

Tweetwallyhelps you create great content for your community through tweets. Tweetwally helps you highlight the contributions of your community members who participate the most by including them in your content. Here are some potential uses for Tweetwally:

Engage your Twitter community by asking a question and showing off their responses in a Tweetwall.

Share a few tweets from a conference hashtag in a conference wrap-up blog post.

Share some takeaways from your webinar with your participants’ tweets.

You may recognize this digital storytelling tactic from blog posts that feature a somewhat similar tool, Storify. Why choose Tweetwally? Tweetwally lets you customize the look of your tweet story, so you can create an embeddable image consistent with your company’s branding.

First, you type in the hashtag or username you want to use to create your story.

Tweetwally is a digital storytelling tool.

Next, Tweetwally will deliver all of the tweets for your chosen search. You can edit the look of your Tweetwall under Display Options.

Customize the look of your Tweetwall in Display Options.

You’re done! Just embed your Tweetwally code into the HTML tab of your blogging system to display your Tweetwall. Here’s just a sample of what a collection of tweets can look like on a Tweetwall.

#3: Make social media listening easier

As a community manager, you’re the eyes and ears of your company.

Monitoring searches for industry keywords and phrases is an important tactic, along with keeping an eye on your competitors. However, with so much real-time community engagement to take care of throughout the day, it’s hard to keep an eye on all those search terms in real time. You need to prioritize and scale. That’s where Twilert comes in.

Twilerts are like Google Alerts for Twitter.

Twilerts are like Google Alerts for Twitter. Set up searches for the keywords or competitors that you want to learn about and get those emailed to you in a daily digest. There are even advanced search options for geolocation, which is perfect for local businesses.

Create local searches in the advanced search of Twilert.

#4: Keep up with social media news

Keeping up with social media news can be tricky, right? There’s so much information out there to stay on top of for your professional development, as well as important information to share with your community. That’s where Summify, a news curation tool, comes in.

Summify shows you a summary of the most shared news stories from your network.

Summify sends you a summary of the most shared news stories from your Twitter network right to your inbox.

In your settings, you can sync this with your Google Reader account and select certain feeds you’d like included in the summaries and customize the frequency that you get them. It’s a great way to keep current on the news you want to know without overwhelming you the way an unread pile of articles in Google Reader or Instapaper can.

#5: Measure your progress

All of the tools listed above will help you effectively manage your community and social media strategy, but measuring what you’re doing beyond “fans and followers” is critical. You want to make data-driven decisions, know how your conversations and content are contributing to your business and pin down the elusive ROI.

Marketing analytics company Performable offers an array of tools to help you measure your activity. Their reporting tools help you understand what actions people take on your website and how they arrived. This helps you see how your Twitter, Facebook or email campaigns are driving engagement on your website or conversions, like event registrations or ecommerce sales.

Here’s an example of Performable tracking engagement on our site, showing that most people came from an April newsletter email campaign sent to community members.

Performable tracks which campaigns are successful at driving conversions on your website.

Performable also features handy marketing and community tools. You don’t have to be an HTML ninja to quickly create targeted landing pages to promote events or webinars to your community.

Performable also offers easy-to-create call-to-action buttons. Offer an ebook or webinar related to your blog post or an invitation to sign up for your newsletter. These are all ways to drive engagement beyond your blog by offering value to your community with content. Because the buttons are so simple to make, you can test several to see what resonates with your community the most.

These are just five of my favorite tools. What social media tools do you use to direct and measure your community management efforts? I’d love to hear about them in the comments box below.

Janet Aronica is Head of Marketing for Shareaholic. You can read her social media blog at JanetAronica.com or say hi on Twitter @JanetAronica. Other posts byJanet Aronica »

http://www.cmsevilla.info Marketing Digital en Sevilla

Great !!! Thaks for Sharing this utils Tools

Janet Aronica

You’re welcome

LeoWid

Janet, this is a great post. I love how you have specifically related each tool to your doings as a Marketing director and community manager. Especially Summify is a tool that I believe is very useful to fight the clutter and only read the most relevant things.

Oh and thanks a lot for featuring Buffer, it is fantastic to be on here. Buffered this post a few times for sure!

Janet Aronica

Was happy to include you guys! And yes, love me some Summify. Definitely helps me stay in the loop on things.

http://www.ivantemelkov.com Ivan Temelkov

Great post here! Some of these tools I’ve never even heard of and it’s good to know that there are others out there besides HootSuite, SocialOomph, or TweetDeck for that matter to assist with social media management. Are there any in particular that you would suggest over others?

http://lighthouseinsights.in/ Prasant Naidu

Undoubtedly Buffer takes your scheduling of tweets to a next level. The best part is that i can plan my twitter stream and buffer takes care when i am sleeping too. Analytics bit is a cool part with this very simple but an effective app. The Advance search options of Twilert makes exciting to give a try and I have started enjoying Summify. Wondering if the the content that is delivered could have an option to be tailor made by the users. For measurement I like Twoolr and these days Sproutsocial has excite me Thanks for bringing up this small but important list thanks @twitter-17218986:disqus

http://twitter.com/JanetAronica Janet Aronica

Yup, I’d recommend these tools over other tools. I have my favorite tools listed on oneforty (where I work) here… http://bit.ly/eEKTO4 I also talked about some other great tools in this post: http://bit.ly/fuDG9e I’m also a big Raven Tools fan, which is an SEO tool.

Janet Aronica

Yup and now Sprout Social has GA integration which I’ve been playing around with to see how that works. Twoolr is good stuff. Thanks for reading!!

http://www.ivantemelkov.com Ivan Temelkov

Thanks for the great insight. I’m big on SEO as well and anything that can be suggested as a tool to be used ends up being included within my marketing toolbox. I appreciate the great information!

http://twitter.com/noreenpickering Noreen Pickering

Great list Janet- using socialoomph but am going to try out Buffer- very useful:)

Janet Aronica

Glad you found this helpful!

http://pajamaproductivity.com Annie Sisk

Good round-up. So many Twitter apps out there these days that I almost never go blindly “shopping” anymore, but rely solely on suggestions from folks I trust.

http://twitter.com/VenderePartners Vendere Partners

Does anyone have any positive or negative comments about ExactTarget’s cotweet?

Janet Aronica

You’re right, there’s a lot of stuff out there! Hope you find these suggestions useful.

http://www.central-e-commerce.com Gabriella – the stepford wife

This was very helpul and there are one or two things I have not heard about before. Even if one is not a social media manager, these are still very helpful tools in my opinion.

http://kristihines.com/ Kristi Hines

I’m always pleasantly surprised when I find tools I’ve never heard of, and that’s the case for 4 out of 5 on this list. Thanks for sharing Janet!

http://twitter.com/gummymobile GummyMobile

Annie-you “rounded” it up good too. So many apps out there, we like to rely on current user feedback and “what’s” working for others. Thank you GummyMobile

I’m glad I could introduce you to some new ones! Let me know if you have specific questions on particular ones, I’ll try to help if I can.

Janet Aronica

I like CoTweet! We use it to run our company account. I like the interface for running multiple Twitter accounts and I like the “assigning” Tweets feature. Could see it being very useful for larger social media teams too.

http://simantel.com Katie Smith

I haven’t heard of Performable. How does it compare to tools such as Alterian SM2, BuzzMetrics or Radian6?

http://www.justellus.com/ Justellus

Great read Janet. Now if a tool could do everything outlined above in one dashboard. It is coming, but still a disjointed hack job. Great job of pulling the process together.

http://www.facebook.com/scott.hammond Scott Hammond

One thing I’m seeing from a lot of people who follow our Nattergalen client accounts on Twitter are paper.li newspapers. I haven’t checked numbers but from what I get just across my desk this site must be really, really hot. It allows users to create a newspaper out of article links pulled from their Twitter network. We have also made it a standard practice to retweet ALL paper.li links on all client Twitter accounts. It isn’t a measuring or account management tool per se, but as a means to manage and move content, and to share content from your network it’s aces. http://paper.li/

http://twitter.com/apmowbray Andrew Mowbray

Crowdbooster (http://crowdbooster.com) is a really powerful new tool. It gives very detailed feedback on how individual tweets are performing and then offers suggestions including the best times of day to tweet. When paired with Buffer it’s a deadly combo.

Janet Aronica

We’re working on it!!

Janet Aronica

Absolutely and they just rolled out FB page analytics which makes them even more powerful. It’s a great tool and a fantastic team.

http://www.hounddogsocialmedia.com Hound Dog Social Media

I think I just fell in love with Summify! Thanks for the tipping us off on this great tool! =) ~Jill

http://daviddoolin.com/ Dave Doolin

Janet, finding stuff Kristi doesn’t know about it *impressive.*

http://www.internetmarketingsource.net Sam Beamond

Yes personally, I have several Twilerts set up, for my own blog, company as well as clients. Its a great tool, to learn about competitors too. I have often found news releases about competitors, that have been useful!

http://sylvanmedia.com/blog Michael

Thanks Janet for your insight to these applications.

They are extremely useful and any combination of these apps would be great for social media marketing plans. I really enjoy Twellow. It’s probably not as visual as the other apps but is a great tool for monitoring your relationships on Twitter. Have you ever used the platform?

Kevin La Rue

Have you checked out the CoTweet Enterprise beta that includes integration with Facebook?

http://felixrelationshipmarketing.com/ Juan Felix

Hi @twitter-17218986:disqus great tools! Thanks for sharing. Like @PrasantNaidu:disqus I’m a big fan of SproutSocial.

Christian

Thanks for this. I see some good tools here. Have you heard of Twit-O-Matic? This is another tool with some really cool features.

http://www.gadarian.com David Gadarian

Good stuff Janet and I’m looking forward to checking out these services. Great comments here too!

http://SEMOmarketingSolutions.com Nancy Camden

Just exactly the kind of great information that keeps Social Media Examiner at the top of my reading list! Specific and leading-edge. Thanks, Janet!

http://www.facebook.com/shaveshop Theshaveshop

I have been using hootsuite but will have to add some of these …thanks

http://www.thenerdynurse.com/ The Nerdy Nurse

Thanks for showing us these great tools! Always interested in finding ways to use twitter more effectively

Any thoughts of Twentyfeet? Just signed up seems pretty good low cost.

Janet Aronica

You’re welcome!

Janet Aronica

Agree, great especially for competitor monitoring and tracking things you might not be able to do all day in real time

Janet Aronica

Yea Twellow is great! Thanks for reading

Janet Aronica

Thanks for reading

Janet Aronica

Ehh honestly don’t like that it autotweets your activity (# of retweets etc) You can of course turn this off but that isn’t the default… that’s my only complaint though.

Janet Aronica

Different than those… like Omniture plus Salesforce. It’s awesome stuff and the data you can get in there is so so cool. If you’re a metrics geek you need to see it

Janet Aronica

Still playing with it… you’ll see a lil writeup on the oneforty blog soon! Thanks for reading this, you guys are so awesome!

http://www.emused.com Emused

Tweetwally is extremely helpful when trying to create a community atmosphere on your site. I’m currently in development and that was one of the first tools I started integrating with.

RavenCourtney

Janet, thanks for these great tips! I am just getting started as Raven Tools’ new community manager and these tools will go a long way toward holding off the information overload I’m already foreseeing!

RuthSheahan

Thanks, Janet! It can be so overwhelming and time consuming to figure out which tools are best for which tasks. Of course, if social media wasn’t overwhelming I might be out of a job.I also like SproutSocial, mentioned above, but a few of its features are lacking.

Also, thanks for addressing the question of the scheduled post. I also believe it is appropriate for curated content and announcements like a new blog post. I don’t think it should be overused. Of course, @unmarketing:twitter says every time you schedule a post a dolphin dies. A baby unicorn too I think

Thank Janet for this great list. This post just tells me how to get to know about new twitter tools and i am going to try them out.

http://www.facebook.com/georgedurzi.JR George Durzi

Hey

http://www.facebook.com/georgedurzi.JR George Durzi

Those are actually great tools. I am still looking for a tool that monitors and account more precisely. If you have anything in mind, please let me know! Great website by the way!

Janet Aronica

Congrats on joining a great company Courtney! You have a great tool at your disposal (Raven) that’ll help you already. Also watch #cmgrchat for more articles. I learned a lot from them when I started at oneforty

Janet Aronica

thanks for reading!

Janet Aronica

Hehe @unmarketing is very opinionated about scheduled posts He’s a smart guy and I respect his thoughts but I think that some appropriately scheduled content helps companies scale. A lot of teams have just one person running a Twitter account and scheduled posts can help.

The tools discovery issue – I hear ya. There’s a lot out there!

Janet Aronica

Hey there! Not totally sure what you mean by monitors your account…do you mean Twitter account? Basic clients are good (Hootsuite, Tweetdeck, Seesmic) and Tap 11 is great as well.

http://www.profitblog.com/ Conde

Thanks for sharing your nice tools, Good Job, this is helpful, I’m finding ways to use twitter more effectively. and here it goes..Keep it up..

exigodm

Thanks. That’s an easy fix, FB profiles are more of a pain than that.

http://ez-money-online-101.com James Money

Great site love the tools ty for the info.

propagandahouse

Great post Janet – particularly interested in Buffer, have seen it mentioned before but yet to try. The ability to schedule articles from Chrome is a real bonus – I currently use bulk schedule on Hootsuite, which requires you to copy the url and tweet to a excel spreadsheet then upload..

Performable’s an interesting one also, I use SproutSocial currently and they’re doing a great job adding new functionality all the time.

Cheers Dan

http://www.twitter.com/unmarketing unmarketing

I disagree

http://twitter.com/MamieSuzanne Suzanne Hiron

Interesting article on Twitter management

http://www.facebook.com/mungaicharles Charles James

I really appreciate this. Very nice insight.

http://twitter.com/balexandros Bryann Alexandros

Me too. I subbed recently to the #infographics one. Paper.li seems to be a good source for pulling recent, but relevant content from contributors on Twitter and Facebook.

http://aremorch.com/ Are Morch

Thanks Janet for sharing these cool tools here.

Was a couple of new and valuable tools here also for me.

Cheers.. Are

Colette

As ever, very, very helpful. Thank you.

http://twitter.com/therealsjr Stewart Rogers

Such a good article Janet.

Personally, I prefer Garious to Buffer since it does a better job of looking ‘human’ and supports more than just Twitter. Before switching to Garious, I used Timely for the same purpose, but found its insistence on using awe.sm for link shortening and the limitation on being a Twitter-only solution too much to bear with.

Jade Pluck

A fantastic post Janet,

Some useful tools my clients may need thank you.

Janet Aronica

Cheers!

Janet Aronica

Thank you for reading

Janet Aronica

Thanks for reading!

Janet Aronica

Definitely check out Performable – It’s different than what Sprout Social or other strictly social media focused tools offer – it ties into your other marketing activities like email etc. The detailed data it offers is very cool. Just depends on what your client’s or business’ needs are, what is a fit. Thanks so much for reading!

Janet Aronica

Thanks for reading!

Janet Aronica

Great thoughts! You bring up a good point – it’s not just about Twitter, it’s about other platforms too. I actually don’t use a tool to post to our FB page. I like posting in real-time each morning right from Facebook.com (like being able to control the thumbnail and the caption better right from FB) and there aren’t any tools I can use (yet) to post things to our LinkedIn group. That’s just me though Thanks for reading!

Janet Aronica

Glad you found this helpful!

http://ejpsocialmedia.com Jenn Dize

Great list! I’m using some of these, but not all — you guys always find the best stuff!

http://www.ricardobueno.com/ Ricardo Bueno

Janet: I’m a fan of using and sometimes scheduling Tweets via Hootsuite. I don’t obsess over the stats and click-thru rates too much but I do look at them. It’s always good to see what type of content and headlines people seem to resonate with the most.

What I’m currently spending most of my time on is creating more and more landing pages for webinars, webinar replays, and ebooks. Integrating social into them to drive engagement via subscriptions to the blog and/or newsletter. In short, I want to turn my company site into the Hubpost of the Real Estate Industry. So far, we on an excellent growth path

Buffer offers some basic analytics that are quite helpful. It shows you number of clicks, reach and retweets (plus who retweeted) for each tweet that you schedule. At the very least, it shows you which tweets and headlines resonate the most with your audience.

http://www.cancer-c.com mesothelioma cancer

Buffer offers some basic analytics that are quite helpful. It shows you number of clicks, reach and retweets (plus who retweeted) for each tweet that you schedule. At the very least, it shows you which tweets and headlines resonate the most with your audience.

http://www.kpib.co.uk/ SEO Company

Love hearing about new social media tools. Have just set up a Twilert account which will hopefully allow for more interaction using Twitter.

julianranger

& so you can have a complete record of your Facebook Page, account and Twitter stream with followers, etc that you can display, search and export have a look at http://www.SocialSafe.net

Jimbunch

Great tools/tips…another one we’ve been using to schedule posts is http://www.Crowdbooster.com. It suggests the best times to send you’re posts based on user engagement/sharing/etc….and its free. Have you tried it?

Very insightful list of twitter tools. Thanks for the list of the top 5, I mean it’s a flouted market so it’s good with a list like this to point out the best of them. Thanks! Another blogpost on my to-check-out-the-tools list.

http://twitter.com/leekelly LeeKelly

Great Article. I’m disappointed that Performable was bought out by hubspot. Are there any similar services available?

Michael O’Brien

Seems like your pushing these . I tried Buffer & thought it was lame & told them so . There are much better tools out there that do all these do & more so why you pushing them . Are you affiliated with these companies in some way ? Lets see Social Oomph , Hoot Suite , Tweet Deck you know the top dogs . So why these, seems all I could say is they are new ? I have not tried all of them but it seems like your pushing single services when the others give the service and so much more in one service most free.Buffer for example Tells you best time to tweet ? If your a social media manager then you understand metrics and would never rely on a service like buffer certainly not pay for it . Just what I think and it’s worth what you paid ! Thanks

http://www.prothomalo.co.uk/ Prothom Alo

Hi janet, thanks for useful info.Nice view of all the possibilities given by these twitter tools. Another useful one for me is tweetalarm, simple but effective.Do you have any siggestion for Facebook?

https://onlinevideomarketing.ws/ Dennis O’Brien

Hi Janet Great community going on. Summify would be the most useful tool for me at this point in my journey. Great post thanks.

http://tobto.org/ seo freelancer

Thanks, Janet, very useful! I guess this article is just the beginning, as Twitter becomes more and more tool.

http://silverstonepixel.com/ mlm software noida

I am using Twitter past 2 months to optimize my software company website. Although i am happy with the output,but want to be serious with twitter to get best from it…As i am newbie,can you please guide me with your ideas and experience,although i lied your ideas and give it a try…Waiting for your response!!

Joycek

thanks for the info, installed and used it already. we will see what the analytics say!!

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